Clean-energy innovations could be sped up with the introduction of UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer.

The £225m new Isambard-AI facility, developed by the University of Bristol in close partnership with HPE and NVIDIA, is able to process in one second what it would take the entire global population 80 years to achieve.

Such impressive processing speeds offer capacity never seen before in the UK, allowing researchers and industry to harness the huge potential of AI in fields such as robotics, big data, climate research and drug discovery.

Isambard-AI, alongside the Dawn supercomputer at the University of Cambridge, will see the UK's compute capacity increase to 23 AI ExaFLOPs, or the equivalent of everyone in the UK spending 85,000 years doing what the full AIRR will do in one second.

It is currently the fourth greenest in the world according to the Green500 list, the eleventh fastest supercomputer in the world and ninth for public supercomputing and the sixth fastest supercomputer in Europe. Built to be incredibly energy efficient, the facility exclusively uses zero carbon electricity.

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